Quotes taken from the introduction to The Utopia of Rules of the same title:
With the collapse of the old welfare states, all this has come to seem decidedly quaint. As the language of antibureaucratic individualism has been adopted, with increasing ferocity, by the Right, which insists on “market solutions” to every social problem, the mainstream Left has increasingly reduced itself to fighting a kind of pathetic rearguard action, trying to salvage remnants of the old welfare state: it has acquiesced with—often even spearheaded—attempts to make government efforts more “efficient” through the partial privatization of services and the incorporation of ever-more “market principles,” “market incentives,” and market-based “accountability processes” into the structure of the bureaucracy itself.
I have mixed feelings on this because I know the 'left' talks plenty about bureaucracy. In a lot of ways, it's also a problem that we maintain the concept of "the left" without actually addressing who is doing what kinds of critiques. This is important to consider, as those "on the left" who are doing the most pro-bureaucracy (generally pro-state) critiques are more aligned with Social Democrats and Marxist-Leninists. Too often, Graeber feels as he's kind of pointing at 'left unity' as a goal... which is an illogical one.
Anarchists in a lot of places have lost some of the fire, but it's mostly those who have not had to deal with a lot of systemic injustice by merely existing: immigrants have long been talking about the harms of bureaucracy, people of colour (especially Black and Latine people) have been frequently discussing it, queer people have also been making a range of critiques on bureaucracy.
If the argument is because of the fact that the word bureaucracy isn't being used, that's either a faulty line of logic or a lazy one that feels as if it is designed to obfuscate (intentionally or not) the work being done by a lot of people who are still frequently overlooked. We all talk about it, but a lot of people aren't listening.
And this feels like it could be a useful place for him to have made the critique that people like him (white, cishet men who work within academia) often neglect it and are upheld for even the most minor criticisms that are built on the backs of others.
Is there any wonder, then, that every time there is a social crisis, it is the Right, rather than the Left, which becomes the venue for the expression of popular anger?
Again, I disagree here because the implied meaning is that the so-called "Left" needs to unify in creating a critique that can stand up to the apparently unified critique "Right." Except that's not a functional idea by any stretch of the imagination because it requires a lot of us to give up our fundamental values, which is the whole basis for so many of these dweebs who now talk about "leftist infighting" as if it's a thing.
Even if that wasn't his intention, he doesn't understand that in order for the "Left" (something he hasn't defined) to have a critique requires the actual existence of the "Left" (which can't possibly exist under any actual recognition of political ideology).
The fact that so many of us with divergent opinions are lumped into a single group makes this impossible and absolutely bizarre as a statement.
The Iron Law of Liberalism states that any market reform, any government initiative intended to reduce red tape and promote market forces will have the ultimate effect of increasing the total number of regulations, the total amount of paperwork, and the total number of bureaucrats the government employs.
Yep, this makes perfect sense and can be easily seen in every single system that we've created. (Though, it's definitely not the only set of reforms that do this.)
Again, even the mainstream Left—or what it is supposed to pass for a Left these days—has come to offer little more than a watered-down version of this right-wing language.
See, here it is again. It's not a clarification at all for who or what "the Left" is, and it continues to obfuscate the point and be used as a means to ignore any real critique that he didn't find.
“Democracy” thus came to mean the market; “bureaucracy,” in turn, government interference with the market; and this is pretty much what the word continues to mean to this day.
This is a useful phrasing for this issue.
In other words, around the turn of the century, rather than anyone complaining that government should be run more like a business, Americans simply assumed that governments and business—or big business, at any rate—were run the same way.
This could be chicken-and-egg, honestly. Is it merely that this is how people assumed governments were operating? Or was it because governments actually operated in this manner (as a result of influences from the businesses both through lobbying and giving power to the businesses)?
Like, how can someone suggest what should be done if it's already being done?
The impression that the word “bureaucrat” should be treated as a synonym for “civil servant” can be traced back to the New Deal in the thirties, which was also the moment when bureaucratic structures and techniques first became dramatically visible in many ordinary people’s lives. But in fact, from the very beginning, Roosevelt’s New Dealers worked in close coordination with the battalions of lawyers, engineers, and corporate bureaucrats employed by firms like Ford, Coca Cola, or Proctor & Gamble, absorbing much of their style and sensibilities, and—as the United States shifted to war footing in the forties—so did the gargantuan bureaucracy of the U.S. military. And, of course, the United States has never really gone off war footing ever since.
And here we are. So again, this feels very much like a chicken-and-egg situation. It's a weird framing, even if correct.
So what are people actually referring to when they talk about “deregulation”?
This is also similar to a question that needs to be asked with regards to "decentralisation." These buzzwords are getting tossed around with multiple definitions being used, as they mean different things to different people and depend upon where they fall in a power structure or hierarchy.
I’m going to make up a name. I’m going to call this the age of “total bureaucratization.” (I was tempted to call this the age of “predatory bureaucratization” but it’s really the all-encompassing nature of the beast I want to highlight here.)
I'm not sure this name is good enough to completely encompass the process that's taking place because he hasn't sufficiently outlined the bureaucratic process. It's truly missing a lot and focusing primarily on the financialisation of everything. It neglects migration patterns, medical paperwork and access, education access, etc. It also fails to recognise the relationships between the financialisation that he points out and their existence. It's a glaring hole, even if he's noting that this bureaucracy exists in places where it should feel awkward (e.g., clubs or memberships, everything having 'legalistic' fine print).
What’s more, since for most of the twentieth century, a job in a large bureaucratic mega-firm meant a lifetime promise of employment, everyone involved in the process—managers and workers alike—tended to see themselves as sharing a certain common interest in this regard, over and against meddling owners and investors. This kind of solidarity across class lines even had a name: it was called “corporatism.” One mustn’t romanticize it. It was among other things the philosophical basis of fascism. Indeed, one could well argue that fascism simply took the idea that workers and managers had common interests, that organizations like corporations or communities formed organic wholes, and that financiers were an alien, parasitical force, and drove them to their ultimate, murderous extreme. Even in its more benign social democratic versions, in Europe or America, the attendant politics often came tinged with chauvinism18—but they also ensured that the investor class was always seen as to some extent outsiders, against whom white-collar and blue-collar workers could be considered, at least to some degree, to be united in a common front.
There are groups who do romanticise this kind of thing, and they're not generally intentional fascists. This is the kind of romanticisation found amongst a lot of union organisers, many of whom I do not think are fascists. But perhaps it should be something these organisers and organisations consider in their structures.
This is particularly true in a lot of union structures that have much deeper connections to the state, be they formal or informal: AFL-CIO in the US, CIGL/CISL in Italy, and the major unions of Slovakia.
It's interesting that these sorts of things go unmentioned when discussing this in any capacity, even as "this is something that members should be vigilant against." Perhaps it's the fear that additional sentiment perceived as anti-union (rather than people perceiving it as actual criticism and caution of structure in a useful organisation).
At the same time, the new credo was that everyone should look at the world through the eyes of an investor—that’s why, in the eighties, newspapers began firing their labor reporters, but ordinary TV news reports came to be accompanied by crawls at the bottom of the screen displaying the latest stock quotes. The common cant was that through participation in personal retirement funds and investment funds of one sort or another, everyone would come to own a piece of capitalism. In reality, the magic circle was only really widened to include the higher paid professionals and the corporate bureaucrats themselves.
This seems like something that could've had some evidence backing it up. Not only to support it and strengthen the argument but also because it feels like something that would be interesting to read more about.
Still, that extension was extremely important. No political revolution can succeed without allies, and bringing along a certain portion of the middle class—and, even more crucially, convincing the bulk of the middle classes that they had some kind of stake in finance-driven capitalism—was critical. Ultimately, the more liberal members of this professional-managerial elite became the social base for what came to pass as “left-wing” political parties, as actual working-class organizations like trade unions were cast into the wilderness.
I don't feel like this is entirely correct. The "working-class organisations like trade unions" were not simply cast into the wilderness. If one reads about, for instance, the AFL-CIO? They learn that the leadership of such organisations often moved into arms of structures that held workers down in order to "get better circumstances for workers" (or so they claimed). This fails to recognise the complicity with which union leadership, predominantly in the most major of unions across the globe, willingly participated in their own decimation.
This also fails to reckon with how more powerful unions (or unions led by people seeking power) harmed those that did not. There's a reason the IWW was constantly harassed by government officials; there's a reason that socialist, communist, and anarchist members were thrust out of unions like the AFL-CIO...
And it's not because these unions were "cast into the wilderness." And by ignoring this, this analysis flounders quite a bit and retains a lot of the romanticisation of unions rather than seeing them as what they should've always been seen as: a strategy. It also means that this is something said in seriousness:
(Hence, the U.S. Democratic Party, or New Labour in Great Britain, whose leaders engage in regular ritual acts of public abjuration of the very unions that have historically formed their strongest base of support.)
This happened under FDR when people who acted as union leadership moved from AFL-CIO to the NLRB, for instance. They started critiquing the ways unions operated because it also harmed their power, even if they once claimed to agree with it. This is also something visible in almost every labour party or group claiming to have been a party of or for workers.
It's like power needs a critique alongside behaviour and action.
From the perspective of sixties radicals, who regularly watched antiwar demonstrations attacked by nationalist teamsters and construction workers, the reactionary implications of corporatism appeared self-evident. The corporate suits and the well-paid, Archie Bunker elements of the industrial proletariat were clearly on the same side. Unsurprising then that the left-wing critique of bureaucracy at the time focused on the ways that social democracy had more in common with fascism than its proponents cared to admit. Unsurprising, too, that this critique seems utterly irrelevant today.
Again, two main issues. First, what happened before the 1960s and how did these 'nationalist teamsters and construction workers' come to be on the side of capital and corporations (fighting against the war effort)? Which ones? Was it all of them? Or was it traditionally a group of white men or white people? Were they upholding patriarchy? White supremacy? Because that's all important as part of this critique.
Second, the argument that "social democracy had more in common with fascism" isn't irrelevant. It's only irrelevant in a place where social democracy doesn't even exist as a concept: the United States. The fact that an anarchist from the United States who had to move to the UK to even continue his career refuses to acknowledge that is absurd, and it shows that he doesn't understand the wider movement. People in places claiming to have "social democratic" principles or programs or policies or whatever, particularly those in places that had "strong" social democracies that have been crumbling from beneath them due to austerity measures, are plagued by thinking they should "go back." And for many of them, that "going back" requires that they play into fascist playbooks.
It's only an irrelevant critique if you're purely talking about the United States, where there hasn't been a social democratic anything in my entire lifetime.